How to compute the functional diversity from 16S rRNA marker gene data?

The 16S rRNA sequencing data can be used to predict the metabolic potentials of the corresponding microbial species based on their phylogenetic distances (PICRUSt ) or sequence similarities (Tax4Fun) to those species whose whole genomes have been sequenced and annotated.

In particular, the PICRUSt is used for Greengenes annotated data and Tax4Fun is used for SILVA annotated data. The result is a table containing relative KO abundance levels. The underlying abundance table is available for download. Once downloaded, the results can be further explored using metabolic network visualization through Shotgun Data Profiling (SDP) module.